You know how it goes – this year’s top-end phones are next year’s mid-rangers. Sure sometimes if a phone is released at the end of the year, it stays “current” for another 12 months, but most often than not – geeks among us want to upgrade.
ARM knows this, but it also knows that more and more people are satisfied with the experience they get from their mid-range device. Look at the Moto X as an example.
So they’re out with a new CPU and GPU design, catered towards the mid-end of the market. Based on 28nm process technology and ARMv7-A architecture, the new Cortex-A17 promises to offer 60% more performance than existing ARM Cortex-A9 processor. It can go up to 2GHz per CPU while supporting ARM big.LITTLE processing.
The ultimate mid-range smartphone using ARM’s new chip, clocked at 2GHz, will use two or four Cortex-A17 cores with four Cortex-A7 cores. The mid-range configuration (1.5GHz) includes two Cortex-A17, and two or four Cortex-A7 cores. Finally, at the very low-end, ARM envisions phones that rely only on four Cortex-A17 cores, clocking at anywhere between 1 and 2 GHz.
As for that new GPU, Mali-T720, its highlights include:
- Open GL ES 3.0, OpenCL and RenderScript, extending the rich visual experience;
- 4x Full Scene Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
- Frequency 695MHz in 28nm HPM
- ARM Mali-DP500 display processor.
The new Cortex-A17 mid-range processor with the Mali T720 GPU is expected in mobile devices during 2015.